Black holes are the only objects in the universe that can trap light by sheer gravitational force.
They're thought to be what anchors galaxies — some of the largest objects in the universe.
And what happens past their event horizon, also known as the point of no return, can only be speculation since we will never get a chance to see it with our own eyes and live to tell the tale.
Despite decades of research, these dynamic cosmological phenomena are still shrouded in mystery. They're still blowing the minds of scientists who study them and here are ten reasons why.
Randy Astaiza contributed to an earlier version of this post.
Black holes do not suck.
Some think that black holes are like cosmic vacuums that suck in the space around them when, in fact, black holes are like any other object in space, albeit with a very strong gravitational field.
If you replaced the sun with a black hole of equal mass, the Earth would not get sucked in — it would continue orbiting the black hole as it orbits the sun, today.
Black holes look like they're sucking in matter from all around, but that's a common misconception. Companion stars shed some of their mass in the form of stellar wind, and the material in that wind then falls into the grip of its hungry neighbor, a black hole.
Black holes were predicted by Karl Schwarzschild.
Einstein didn't discover the existence of black holes — though his theory of relativity does predict their formation. Instead, Karl Schwarzschild was the first to use Einstein's revolutionary equations and show that black holes could indeed form.
He accomplished this the same year that Einstein released his theory of general relativity, 1915. From Schwarzschild's work came a term called the Schwarzschild radius, which is a measurement of how small you would have to compress any object to create a black hole.
In theory, any object can become a black hole if you compress it to a small enough space because when you compress it, you make it more dense, giving that object a stronger gravitational pull.
For example, if you shrunk Earth down to the size of a peanut, it would be dense enough to form a black hole. Different objects must be shrunk down to different sizes — it's the radius of a the sphere you would have to compress the object down to in order to get a black hole that the Schwarzschild radius refers to.
Black holes could spawn new universes.
It might sound crazy that black holes could spawn new universes— especially since we're not sure other universes exist — but the theory behind this is an active field of research today.
A very simplified version of how this works is that our universe today, when you look at the numbers, has some extremely convenient conditions that came together to create life. If you tweaked these conditions by even a miniscule amount, then we wouldn't be here.
The singularity at the center of black holes breaks down our standard laws of physics and could, in theory, change these conditions and spawn a new, slightly altered universe.
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